Visible Technologies Launches Social Intelligence Product

This morning at 6 AM PST (way too early for me, but thankfully I was briefed before) Visible Technologies (client) announced the release of their new product. I worked with them on this project and you can stop reading now if you think this is a biased post.

It is not.

I always said that I chose my clients and projects based on what has similar views to what I hold. I am very passionate in my work, and passion cannot be faked — so I have to agree with the topic.

This is one of those cases.

If you ever asked me or hear me talk about Social Media Monitoring (SMM), I’ve been saying for some time that it is a commodity, soon to be extinct. There is very limited, if any value, today from its current inception. That has been proven by virtually every vendor building their own module for it in a short time, for little investment. There is some limited value to the remaining SMM tools in the market, but I don’t expect to say the same in 12 months or less — at least not for those are simply counting hits and reporting them in a dashboard. They need to grow and become something more, work on the data they collect and report more than a count or sentiment analysis on it (which is usually not very reliable anyways).

They need to create intelligence.

This is an opinion I shared with my clients, including of course more details of specific actions and features they can take to take their SMM to the next level. I shared this view with Visible at the very beginning of our relationship and they agreed.

They had been working on combining five different products under one common platform for some time now. If you knew them before, you knew them as a SMM (Social Media Monitoring) vendor – someone who competed with Radian6, ScoutLabs and Biz360 before the acquisitions, Crimson Hexagon, Alterian-Techrigy, Sysomos and few others. Alas, their power was never on the capturing of social media and counting of occurrences, that was just one part of it. The power of their combined solution is the analytics engine and the ability to generate intelligence from that analysis. Not simply reporting and dashboarding – actual intelligence on the information collected. The problem they had was it was spread across different products, not in a single location.

They now have brought all their products together in a single platform that can capture., analyze, generate intelligence, and integrate with CRM and other legacy systems. I saw how it works. I like the concept as it focuses more on the analytics not the technology . Visible Intelligence generates Social Intelligence (no, not that one — the other one… it is all in my white paper that you should read), real actionable intelligence from social channels. Some of their customers already have it working and the results have been spectacular and incredible. (their words). There is a very interesting case study in the white paper you should read as well. The white paper is downloadable from their web site, link is at the end of this post.

I won’t go on and on about it, you get the idea. It is a step in the right direction and I am looking forward to see what the market says about it, and the concept of Social Intelligence.

Check it out (video explaining their concept of Social Intelligence, and my white paper available in the main page).

In fact our change of CEO is very positive. Kelly Pennock, our new CEO has experience with several successful start ups as both CTO and CEO. He was the CTO who architected the new Visible Intelligence platform we launched yesterday. Stay tuned for great things from us.

The new architecture was developed under Bill Baker the former CTO. Visible Tech CEO Dan Vetras fired Bill and hired his own eventual successor (probably last thing on his mind) Kelly Pennock. As the new CTO he spent almost all of his time on the business side of things rather than the technology side. I heard that he installed a new team of engineers and a new director of development which probably made a lot of people expendable once the new product was released.

Thank you for your post on our new platform and our shared vision that organizations need to move past social media monitoring to using social data as intelligence that informs the enterprise to drive improved business outcomes.

An interesting post and comments here. I like that they are focusing on extracting meaningful data from the mass of noise out there but am suprised they have lost so many staff. Do you think this is related to losing the CIA contract or something else that’s happening that we just don’t know about? Maybe some cause for concern here despite the positive-sounding news?